On the way to the studio (she could not stay put to wait for her husband after all: she needed to be in motion, she needed action), Milena covered her head with her hands and moaned: she suffered stabs of a festering and, most importantly, undeserved feeling of defeat. She had done everything the way she was supposed to, she put herself out there and worked hard, so hard that Poppet had been reproaching her (although he had recently stopped), and now that odious creature was sitting in her studio, winking and hinting at something filthy, and no one seemed to have noticed the difference! True, over the show’s run Milena herself had learned many new things, had grown professionally, as everyone said of her, and would no longer make fun, the way she used to, of her news-department colleagues, for really coming to life only when there were catastrophes, fires, or murders, the more atrocious the better—it doesn’t take a genius to realize that if you want people to hear you in all this racket and not change the channel, you either have to hit them, hard, with something, or scratch a very private itch, and do it so masterfully, too, that they’ll keep coming back for more, changing your technique, so to speak, and whoever says that’s easy is a loser who couldn’t cut it himself, but! There was, all the same, a but. As the thought of that obscene complacent mug on the screen (oh, to smash it in!) washed back over her, Milena was blinded, as by a stroke of lightning, by a long tremor of hatred, very much like that of love, that ran down the whole length of her body. “What do I do now?” she mumbled to herself, ever so quickly, unconsciously speeding up her steps and digging her fingers into her coat collar, as if it were her enemy’s throat: Milena was scared.
“Caw, caw, ca-a-aw!” She suddenly heard the cries above her. Milena raised her head: way up high, about halfway to the raw and empty sky that with springtime was already farther away, swayed tree branches in an imitation of a Japanese ink painting and circled a flock of startled crows. What a beautifully composed shot, and so apropos, she thought, you wouldn’t have to edit a thing—and from that moment on, everything around her began to roll smoothly, like on TV, as if she had stepped right into that world behind the screen where one did not need to make any decisions. Only to watch.
In the hallways at the studio no one paid any attention to her, colleagues sped past her, goggle eyed and unseeing, and not a living soul lingered for a smoke in the stairwell. Here Milena remembered, with an instant chill, that she had rushed out of the house without her makeup, not even a touch of lipstick, and felt intensely embarrassed, as if she’d shown up in her underwear alone, and at the same time glad that no one had noticed her, so she could still slip out, dash home, put on some makeup, and come back with a respectable face, so as to ignite, with her hello to the guard at the entrance turnstile, the happy hubbub of greetings and hustle and send up ahead of her, like a flame along the detonating cord, up to the elevators, along the hallways, zigzagging into offices and studios. For some strange reason, the simplest and most obvious solution did not even cross Milena’s mind—namely, to drop by the makeup department and pant to the ladies, So sorry, ran myself ragged, could you please put some war paint back on?—and to chat with them for a bit, share a smoke, take a breather before going to work, especially since the girls liked her, followed her show religiously, and one, who was divorced herself, even told her she unplugged her phone so that no one would spoil it for her. However, nothing even close to that dawned in Milena’s tangled-up mind, as she stalked, instead, down the hallways like a sleepwalker, a ghost, toward the service stairs—she felt this compulsion to escape down the service stairs and no other way—peeking into open doors as she walked, while keeping her own face in the shadows as if it’d been burned. The next instant, her director all but fell into her as he charged out of his office, twisted out of the way, mumbled, in Russian, for some reason, “Excuse me,” and brushed past her in a waft of sulfurous smell: a match, Milena thought, watching a curl of grey smoke unfurl above him as he fled into the narrowing depth of the hallway. The poor sucker is going to burn right at work one day, occurred to her, out of place and without pity, for somehow she lacked not only pity but any feelings at all, as if the light bulbs meant to illuminate them had all been unscrewed, and she was watching just the frames, one after the other, or rather, moving, involuntarily, from frame to frame on a flickering film, unable to stop, compelled to keep moving, while feeling anything, she remembered lucidly, would require her to step out of the flow and pause—and so it was that as soon as an emotion came to life inside her, like a spark, a gleaming little bug, it was shaken off on the run, edited out, blown off like ash into the air. People sped this way and that like comets, in intersecting sparkling cascades of tails as they burned out—more luxuriant behind some, more sparse behind others, whereby a constantly elevated working temperature was maintained on the premises and over the years, the walls, faces, and floor of the studio acquired that fine, barely visible bluish-grey tint that studio guests took to be the residue of plain old cigarette smoke, while it was not plain or simple at all, albeit indeed a kind of smoke. What a wonderful job I have, Milena thought with pride or, more precisely, an embryo of pride—the emotion flared behind her like a firefly, brushing imperceptibly against her cheek, and sizzled on the floor, without developing into a thought. Milena held her gaze before her, like a camera: the corridor was running into her, breaking in unexpected turns, and flashing increasingly goggle-eyed faces to meet her, but the main effect came from the fact the camera was hidden, because no one saw Milena—had no time to see her, actually, because the film kept rolling faster, jerkily, so people were no longer walking, but trotting and galloping. Before Milena’s very eyes—that is, in front of her camera—the studio head’s secretary, a long-haired blonde, becoming short haired and then a brunette, as she went, dropped a fetus conceived, evidently, just a minute earlier, which, with a gurgling froggish croak that Milena found vaguely familiar, slipped into the ashen twilight of the hallway and instantly vanished as if it had tumbled into the fourth dimension. Was it the studio head’s, wondered Milena, a quick scribble in her mind, a question mark in the margin of the script, purely for the sake of form, because she really wasn’t in the least curious, so the question tumbled off after the wretched fetus that had already been forgotten, including by Milena herself, who, nonetheless, remembered that she needed to reach the service stairs, and could only wonder, if the word was still at all applicable, why it was taking her so long to find them. Again, the director, now with a beard, popped out of a doorway, using both hands to jostle ahead of him, like a cart in a supermarket, two rather heavy women, who were glued to each other, as if in the act of making love, which somehow conveyed to Milena that one of them was supposed to be her new jilted heroine, and the other quite the opposite, her rival home-wrecker, and again she put an approving exclamation mark in the invisible margin—this was a great idea to liven up the show, as long as the women didn’t get into a catfight in the studio—although right behind them, wiping out any traces of them, stampeded a herd of men in identical grey suits with identical pins on their lapels, which Milena didn’t see clearly, some of them running bent under the weight of long banners with text that blurred into a single swoosh, and the last one even carrying the red-and-blue flag of Soviet Ukraine—but then, right after them, came dashing victorious athletes, whose feet sent off resounding echoes with their purposeful stomp, melded together into a yellow-and-blue whole, led by one who seemed to Milena, by now dazed from the onslaught of faces, to be racing with a lit Olympic torch, so the overall effect was cheerful and life affirming. But here a shot of the grey sky and crows was suddenly wedged in again: caw, caw, ca-aw! The branches swayed up high. Where had the ceiling gone? A double exposure, she erred in editing, Milena grasped, forgetting about her unmade-up face, and grabbed the first prop that came to hand—a door handle that gave way at a light push and revealed none other than Milena’s own familiar studio, with cameras set for taping, and two chairs, lit up from all sides, on the podium. One, for the guest, was still empty, whil
e sitting in the other one, obscured by the lid of her compact for a last quality-control look at herself, was an awfully familiar woman dressed in crimson, knees pressed together roundly under her skirt like a shield, also in a very familiar manner. “Where have I seen her?” Milena fretted while she noticed at the same time that the backdrop in the studio—and with it, the branding of the show—had changed: like an ad for Revlon lipstick, an image of gigantic, moistly parted lips that promised either to surrender or to swallow you whole in one gulp, was hanging there now. And there was something else looming behind the chairs, in the unlit background, something like a low couch, as in a psychoanalyst’s office, but that she didn’t get a good look at, because just then the woman in the chair took the compact away from her face, and looking at Milena was her own face—that is, not hers, but the face of that other Milena, from the screen, only this time it was improbably, not even humanly, terrifyingly beautiful, as if from the era of silent film: the eyes flamed like precious jewels, the lips blazed, the witchy eyebrows met on the bridge of her nose in a swallowtail, and her skin, matte with makeup, disdainfully immobile in the glaring spotlight, exuded that heavenly peace that only the screen can feign, and the only thought that occurred to Milena, bewildered and still dumb in the doorway, was, I wonder what they’ve been feeding her to get her to look like that! while the other one regarded her with displeased surprise as if wondering who this intruder was and just about to clap her hands from her luminous height for someone to throw the pest out the door. But this is my studio, and this is my show! Milena almost cried out, humiliated to the verge of tears, including by her own appearance, so out of place here, so plain she might as well be invisible, so inappropriate she couldn’t dream of proving anything to anyone but ought to run away, crawl into a hole, and not inflict herself on anyone’s sight, because one look at the two of them was enough to say with certainty which one deserved a place in the studio—and it was not the derelict in the doorway! But still—how did the bitch dare, and where was everyone looking, the director, the studio execs, the viewers—and since when had she installed herself here?
On this last thought Milena had to step aside to make way for a procession that advanced, like a wedding train, from the hallway: the director—now clean shaven again!—the camera operators, not one but two makeup girls, and other dark figures, all of them engaged in escorting, almost carrying, a young blonde woman, in a pageboy haircut and barely conscious with emotion, with delicately curved cheekbones and a precious little nose on which drops of sweat had broken through the makeup. The woman’s eyes were still and glassy as if she were in a trance; they did not express anything themselves, only reflecting the light from outside, and Milena, the one who was standing at the door, of course, was stung by a vague recollection of having seen eyes like that before, in someone dear to her (close, warm), and of that moment being connected to something extremely unpleasant. The blonde woman stepped forward precariously, as if her knees were about to buckle, and she was on the verge of crashing down, arms outstretched before her, with cries of ecstasy, because she was also breathing quickly and her lips were moistly parted, exactly like the ones on the backdrop, but it wasn’t the backdrop that she was staring at so unblinkingly, like a calf at the sacrificial flames, but—Milena herself went numb, as she followed her gaze—at that other one on the set, who was now poised like a panther about to leap, and was greeting her guest with a smile so greedy, so evil, and yet so lush playing on her lips: Come on now, come on, closer, closer, as if she were drawing her in, like a spider, step by step, along an invisible length of taut sticky silk, until Milena could hear it humming. Or maybe it was the hum of the cameras that came on just in time to capture the blonde woman, already hooked up to a microphone on the collar of her blouse, as she neared the podium and raised—honestly, raised!—her prayerful, incredulous hands up, Ave, Cesarina! to the rapacious witch in the crimson dress, which itself became at once vibrant and fluid, as if filled with blood, and as the other woman, with a purposeful twist of her torso, bent to support her (Come to me, and I will soothe you) literally to snatch her, suck onto her because the poor thing was reeling, was ready to fall to the ground at the feet of her deity from an overabundance of feeling, and, oh my god, did she really just almost kiss the witch’s hand? “Music!” someone called out breathlessly, running past Milena in the dim light and nearly knocking her down onto the pile of plywood cubes, boards, and other rummage stacked up against the wall. “Don’t forget the music in this episode!” “Fuck off,” a nasal voice responded clearly out of the dark, sending shivers between Milena’s shoulder blades: the sound of it made her realize that something horrible was about to happen on the set, something so far beyond even her imagination that she just had to switch channels immediately, and, her mind grinding, like millstones, over the same mindless question of What is going on, what is going on, what, in the name of all that is holy, is going on, Milena lunged through the door back into the hallway.
She is going to slaughter her, the next thought caught up with Milena on the run in the hallway—she is going to spread her out nicely on that chaise longue of hers and slaughter her, slice her into little pieces with a knife, and that sheep of a woman will expire with a smile on her lips, are they all crazy in there that they don’t see this coming? She rewound the scene in her mind and hardly had any more doubt that things were really heading toward a ritual killing that had to be urgently stopped, and the script required her, Milena, to stop it, and that was why she couldn’t find her way to the service stairs. Once set in motion, the plot was unfolding according to the television’s iron logic of resolution—a discovery that could not fail but inspire Milena to act decisively, and even enthusiastically. She tried to return to the terrible studio, but this turned out not to be all that easy to do: once again the interminable hallway bored into her view, snapping off here and there dark flashes of sudden turns, people speeding back and forth, and suddenly she ran into the noisy throng of a whole troupe of leading Kyiv actors, all of them, for some reason, in wheelchairs. She was jostled and pushed with her nose up against a brass plaque that was cold to the touch (and covered, like a windowpane fogged with breath, with a sticky film of that TV ash), and on which Milena, who pushed herself back with revulsion, read, to her great delight, the title, “Studio Head.” Of course, that’s who must put an end to this outrage! She wriggled with renewed zeal until she could feel the doorknob, turned it, and burst in: the secretary wasn’t in the reception area (must’ve jumped out for another abortion), the door to the office was cracked open, and the studio head was in—Milena saw him from behind, facing his desk, a very wide oak table, about the size of a Soviet Khrushchev-era apartment hallway, grandly authoritarian, at the very sight of which Milena, and more than likely not she alone, used to experience a sneaky arousal, marveling at the same time how power could be so sexy even when represented by a table. At the moment, however, it was not the table that had her attention, but the studio head, to whom something strange was happening: black netted wings, narrow like a grasshopper’s or a dragonfly’s, appeared to grow straight out from the stiff shoulders of his suit jacket, and they were moving, preparing to spread, which made the jacket tug back and forth between them, comically flapping its rumpled vents. The next moment the wings flapped decisively, letting out at the ends what looked like bird beaks, and became, right before bewildered Milena’s eyes, a pair of outstretched woman’s legs in fishnet stockings and black pumps with pointed heels. Milena must have made a muffled sound because the studio head made one, too, looked behind him, and froze at the sight of Milena with his unzipped pants, while Milena herself was presented with a view of what was behind him, a sight that caused her to think, for the first time in her life, agreeably, Now I’m definitely going nuts, and it’s nothing to be afraid of, sort of interesting: the first thing she registered, a single smear, was the crumpled stain of familiar crimson, then a terrifying flash of something naked and hairy, in stripes, and finally, her own unrecog
nizable face—she, that bitch from the studio, was positioned on the studio head’s table with her legs triumphantly thrown up in a V-for-victory worthy of a rally. She swung one in the air, as if conducting an inaudible orchestra, and watched Milena with no expression at all, as if she were an insect. “Excuse me,” Milena muttered stupidly, and the studio head, holding up his trousers, moved his lips in mirrored obedience, echoing her, but then he was impatiently kicked by the swinging fishnetted leg with its heel, and Milena heard a sharp cry, like an order for the firing squad, she’d never heard herself make that sound: “What’d you stop for? Give me more! More!” The studio head grunted, twitched, coughed out his half-swallowed “Excuse me” over his shoulder in Milena’s direction, and again two netted black wings squeezed and pinched him from the sides, and he obediently resumed his trot-like thrusting to the accompaniment of that savage, vulgar whoop of “More! More!” Herself shaking with a repulsive dry shiver from deep within her gut, Milena shuffled blindly out of the office and shut the door tight behind her: an utterly futile gesture that did nothing to muffle the whoops, they kept coming, roaring in her ears, and the ceiling collapsed into oblivion from it, and there, flying above the swaying tree branches, cawing, were the crows. There was really nothing more to do at the studio.
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